Archive for April, 2014

As Labour’s shadow Finance Minister David Parker pointed out on RNZ this morning, New Zealand has led the way internationally by making the control of inflation the sole focus of its central bank - with the dire result that when property prices go up in Auckland, the Reserve Bank feels ...

Shane Jones has left Parliament in the manner to which we have become accustomed, with self interest coming in first and second, and with the interests of the Labour Party (under whose banner he served) way, way back down the track. The timing of his departure - five months before ...

Reportedly, US drone operators refer to their kills as "bug splat” - mainly because when the carnage is viewed on their screens thousands of kilometres away at home, it looks like an insect strike on a windscreen. The name has even been bestowed on the software used in the system. ...

With the death of Sir Owen Woodhouse, the founding father of the Accident Compensation Scheme, New Zealand has lost one of the titans of its post-war social policy. In its original incarnation in the early 1970s, ACC had been a globally innovative “no fault” scheme whereby accident victims surrendered their ...

Ultimately the Queen’s longevity has been one of her most significant accomplishments. A transition to Prince Charles while the monarchy was in the pits of public esteem in the mid to late 1990s would have been disastrous for the Royal Firm. Far more congenial representatives have now emerged. Predictably, the ...

David Cunliffe won his current job by indicating he would be a Labour leader proud of his party’s left wing traditions. Since then, a question mark has been hanging over how Cunliffe would handle Labour’s relationship with the Greens during the run-up to the 2014 election. After all, some senior ...

On the upside, the gigantic election process that began yesterday in India is the largest exercise in democracy on the planet. Reportedly, a staggering five million people are employed, directly or indirectly, in the election process. The likely outcome is not quite so welcome. On current projections it seems that ...

So much for the demonising of trade unions. As the dust setttles on the Global Financial Crisis, some US corporate leaders seem able to read the lessons of history. Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, has credited his company’s survival to what, to some, would seem to ...

In effect, there are three main candidates running in Afghanistan’s presidential election this week: the former diplomat Abdullah Abdullah, the former World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani, and Zalmai Rassoul - who was, until last year, Foreign Minister in the government of Hamid Karzai. Rassoul is widely perceived ...

The ban on Japan’s whaling programme ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is a credit to Australia, who brought the case. Indirectly, it is also a victory for the Sea Shepherd group, whose activism doggedly kept global attention focused on what Japan has been doing in the southern ...